The environment? Are people still worrying about that thing? Sad

I’m never going to have children. Now you don’t know me and I don’t know you (probably), there are a variety of perfectly natural reasons why any normal person might make a decision like that, and, from the outside, hearing that might even seem like a good thing. With a near quadrupling of the world’s population in the course of the last 80 years, it might actually be okay if more and more of us choose against having children simply from the perspective of our finite natural resources. But trust me when I say that my decision against having children doesn’t come from a good or helpful place. Diseases long thought eradicated are coming back while other, more present-day maladies are surely and steadily becoming untreatable. Mass shootings, especially at schools, happen at such an alarming rate that they’re no longer raising that many alarms. One of the biggest nations in the world made the least informed, most deliberately manipulated, and most destructive decisions it possibly could have in selecting its new leader. Anthony Bourdain is dead. In the same year that Stephen Hawking died. Kids are eating Tide PODS®. It feels like every direction we could turn to, things are getting worse and worse and often almost willfully more stupid. Just about the last thing I would want to do is leave someone I care about and am responsible for trapped on this doomed, morally bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet.

Theater of Life images courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada and Triplex Films International

You may think about homelessness on occasion, but, by and large, it’s not typically one of those things we usually consider on a regular basis. In a country like ours, Canada, most of us have the luxury of thinking about homelessness as a hypothetical rather than living it as a reality, contemplating it mostly at certain specific times of the year that encourage charity and caring for your fellow man [like now], but that doesn’t mean it just goes away or stops being a problem when you’re no longer paying attention to it. An extensive 2013 study from the Canadian Homelessness Research Network shows that at least 200,000 Canadians experience homelessness in a year, and at least 30,000 Canadians are homeless on any given night. Continue reading →